Advice

That’s rubbish: positive vs negative thinking

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I'm British and a journalist, cynicism comes to me a lot more readily than happy happy joy joy thinking. But the kicker for me is that it's quicker to think positively.

You know this already: when things are bad, you spend an awful lot of time brooding. That's too feeble a word: worrying, fretting, chewing, pondering, hating. When things are good, you get on to the next job.

I have also realised that it's true: I shouldn't make decisions and I definitely shouldn't act on them when I'm depressed. I still struggle with the concept of telling myself everything is wonderful all the time but I like the idea of head-down getting-on-with-it-all regardless.

Which is what I take away from this piece on The Simple Dollar about negative thinking:

You have to recognize when you’re telling yourself to make poor choices. For me, the best way to counteract this is to have a checklist of the things you’re working on and review it several times a day.

Today is the hardest day for keeping resolutions.

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I think it is, anyway. Sorry: no science or research here. Just a lot of years where some of it was in companies and the first Monday of the year was a hard one to ramp yourself up for. And for actually a lot more years when I've been working for myself and today is the day you feel you're starting over again from scratch.

That would be because you're starting over from scratch. All those books you wrote last year, you wrote them last year. Gone. What have you done this year? Bugger-all.

But don't think of today as a new working year. Don't think of it as a year at all. Think of it as exactly what it is: a day.

Today I'm working at a school for the day and part of me feels this is postponing all the freelancy getting-new-work stuff until tomorrow. But this is new work, this is a new school to me and it's working with the staff instead of with the kids and it's working with two other writers for the first time. So it's all new, it's all work, and it should be all great.

And I will worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. I will worry about it, but it will be tomorrow.

Small moves, Ellie.

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You already know that making too big a statement at the start of the year ain't going to work. I will go to the moon, salvage all the junk that's up there, bring it back and sell it. Or even just I'm going to lose three stone in weight by Tuesday. But there are also apparently small resolutions that you give up on because they are out of your control: I will get an agent this month, that kind of thing. There is a huge amount you can do toward getting an agent if that's what you need and you can do a gigantic amount of it right now, but the final step requires them saying yes and offering you a deal you want. You can't control their schedule, therefore you can't control yours. Not in this one case.

But if you pick smaller goals and ones that are within your control, you aren't just making life easier for yourself, you're helping to convince yourself that resolutions are achievable. If we never did the bigger ones we'd never do anything, but having small, concrete, possible resolutions that we then actually do and actually stick to, it helps a mile.

So says an article in Pick the Brain anyway.

Hat tip, as so often, to Lifehacker for spotting this.

Snoozers are (allegedly) losers

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I now cannot imagine lying in later than 5am on a writing day. I can dream about it, but I can’t imagine it. The New Yorker here makes me feel a little better. Only a little. But alongside it’s harsh information about not snoozing on, there is advice we can all apply whatever stupid time we have to get up.

Here’s The New Yorker article.

 

Documenting The Blank Screen part 1

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This is just a website but it’s also the result of a lot of changes in my business and therefore in my online work: before this, I had a personal blog called Self Distract over on Blogger – I had such a good time there – plus a general personal williamgallagher.com website and what was supposed to be a business one for The Blank Screen book and workshops.

That last one never worked out. Roaring hosting problems, months of them, pointless errors. But as well as meaning I couldn’t rely on that site staying up, it also missed its launch date. Weirdly, the hosting errors were sometimes pulling down williamgallagher.com too so it was getting ever urgent that it be fixed and now I believe it all is. I’ve believed this before, roughly monthly since last May, so we’ll see. But as part of fixing that problem and part of how The Blank Screen keeps on growing, I spent about a month investigating whether I could have a single site for everything – and what that single site could be.

I want to tell you about this in case it’s of use: I spent a long time looking for the information I needed and went off a little ways down the road further than I needed. So if you do the same and I get the tagging right so that you can ever find this, hopefully it’ll help you.

I also want to tell me. Compared to my various iterating sites since a 1990s one solely about the BBC drama series Campion, this new spot for me is complicated. You don’t need to know that, but I do. Once I’d grasped that you don’t have to put your site on wordpress.com in order to run Wordpress on it, I changed my mind and embraced this platform. I still have the issue I’ve always had that you can tell me there are a million Wordpress themes – designs, really – but it’s as if everyone uses the same three. As I write this, I am no different. I’m using a theme called Reddle which is the first I tried.

It’s not the only one I tried, let’s be clear about this, but I think it may even have been the default. But I like it a lot and if I don’t add a background image, it has a plain stark simplicity that appeals to me and which also fits the idea of The Blank Screen.

But it took a month to get here and there are so many options that I need to keep straight in my head for any time I want to change anything.

So if you’re looking for help with your site, scroll down and keep an eye out for the headings that may be the most use to you. If you’re me, future William, and you’re trying to fathom out what the hell you did because you now need to fix it, take a biscuit or three and get reading.

The beginning: needing a Blank Screen news site

The first step was wanting to make more of The Blank Screen website since it had missed its launch and was just sitting there for me. Flashforward: I ditched the webspace and pointed the URL at williamgallagher.com in the end.

But I wanted a site I could post productivity and Blank Screen articles to. I wanted to know if I had the material to do this very often: Self Distract is once a week, I knew if The Blank Screen were to be worth reading, it had to be at least daily. Hopefully many times a day. But that meant there being enough to write about and it meant my being able to write it all that often. I secretly soft-launched a site on wordpress.com on 26 November 2013 and tried it out. As of today, 28 December 2013, I’ve posted over eighty times.

So I am now confident that there is material and confident that I can write it. I’m also enthused: with literally zero promotion – zero – I gained about a dozen followers to that site. I’ve now lost them all as I’ve moved away from the test, but.

I could have stayed on wordpress.com and I believed I had to. But I need to run ads on here: hopefully tasteful, hopefully few, and certainly nothing that will especially roll in the cash. (Update: I just checked and I made 74 pence from a test on my Self Distract blog. I will never see that 74p: you only get the cash when it exceeds some set amount. I’m not sure what it is, but probably around ten pounds. But I’m here for the long game and I needed ads in place from the start for it to ever generate cash and also, more importantly, so that you saw ads from the beginning. I don’t like the idea of building a site up over time and then switching on ads. Feels like me saying gotcha.)

But you can’t run Google Adsense ads on wordpress.com-based sites unless you pay for a premium theme/design. I was willing to do that: I was budgeting to do it when I believed it was my only option. I’d have to be paying at least £90 annually so that’s a lot of 74 pences but if it had to be done, it had to be done.

That’s been the key thing I’ve learnt from the whole process: you don’t have to be on wordpress.com to run Wordpress. Forgive me if this is obvious to you, it really wasn’t to me and that affected my plans for several weeks. Wordpress is a tool, a platform, for building websites and you can host them on the Wordpress company’s own space and use their extra benefits, but you don’t have to. With certain technical limitations that I don’t understand, you can use Wordpress on any hosted webspace you’ve got. Including the one I was already using. I’d tell you which one that was but I’m still smarting from the problems I’ve had.

Given that I could use this existing space and that I could run Wordpress on it, that meant I could use the benefits of Wordpress’s comparative simplicity and its abilities to handle web technologies I needed. It also meant I could run ads without buying a premium anything. As of this moment, it costs me $6.50/month to host williamgallagher.com which is one site that includes my personal site, The Blank Screen news plus my weekly Self Distract blog.

Or rather it appears to. It appears to and it actually does, but not in the way it looks. The Blank Screen is a news site but technically that’s a blog so for a long while I had to puzzle out how to have effectively two blogs on the same site. I originally learnt how to just make it look on screen as if they were separate but they really stayed the same and everything fell apart when I looked at how people could follow them. If you wanted to follow The Blank Screen, you’d get, what, twenty or more posts a week and I don’t think you’d mind very much that every Friday there’d be one Self Distract entry in there. But if you wanted to follow Self Distract – and 45 people did back on its old Blogger site – then I think you would mind very much when your one Self Distract per week was accompanied by twenty productivity articles.

The answer was to use a Wordpress feature called multisite and lie my head off at you: this is really two sites masquerading as one. You don’t need to know that but, man, I do. Once you tap on the Self Distract button you zoom off to another site and I have to make sure that all the menus connect back to where you think they do. That just means that when I make a change to the menu on williamgallagher.com I have to make the same change to the menu on williamgallagher.com/selfdistract/ which is a pain yet not really all that much of one.

Except I get lost. During the month’s secret soft-launch test, I ran a wordpress.com-only site and that worked well. During the last week or so, I moved back to my own space and I ran a test on the space I then had for The Blank Screen. Nobody ever went to that site because I couldn’t risk telling them it was there – as sometimes it wasn’t. Grrr. But I had this space, I had this need, I did the whole shebang there for a week or ten days. Found this multisite stuff, got it working, got used to how very easy it was to tap on a Wordpress menu and see my three sites listed: williamgallagher.com, The Blank Screen and Test. I no longer remember what Test was for. But the ease of going between them was great.

Until I moved it all to williamgallagher.com’s webspace and now have two sites but no easy way of swapping between them. I can do it, it gets done, but it’s a couple of steps now and I don’t understand the reason. It was actually this that made me decide I needed to document the work just so I can keep it straight in my head. Let me state, then, that to change sites as the owner/operator, I can choose William Gallagher and the Blank Screen from Wordpress’s My Sites menubar. And to change to Self Distract I have to choose that same My Sites, select Network Admin, choose Sites, then when all the sites are listed, then find Self Distract and tap on Dashboard.

Easy.

I need more biscuits.

Back later with the rest of the documentation and a plateful of dark chocolate digestives.

Ask for what you want and ask it now, ask up front

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I do talk about this in my book, The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers but I’ve just now, this minute, had to put it into use for a new reason. When you want something and you’re emailing somebody to get it, say so right at the top. Line one.

The reason I give in the book is that we’ve all had emails where we’ve wondered what in the hell this person wants. And when they do that very British thing of working up to the point by reminding you who they are, how we met, how, gosh, you said some day you could send me something, maybe, hello, it has an unintended effect. I read all this about that time we met in ‘Nam, how we stole a taxi together in Saigon and wrote Les Mis 2 together and as it goes on, as it gets ever more specific, I can’t help but worry. This is going to be big, I think. This is going to be really serious. This may be trouble.

And then they just ask for a link to the book. (Here, have the UK link and the US one too. It’s no trouble.)

But there is also the fact that saying what you want right at the start is a difficult writing task. Especially today. I had to write to my agent with all sorts of issues. All good, you understand, but just the sheer volume of things to discuss about new projects, things I want him to do, things I should’ve told him I’d already done.

The more I thought about it, the more I could think of other issues I needed to cover. It’s fine to think I should pick one and only email about that, leave the rest to another day but this is a real job and a real email about a real thing. Anything like stripping it down would be a correct writing exercise but not what he or I needed. Too much, too intertwined, too complicated.

So I started with line one. What I want.

There is always something that you want most, there is always something that you want first. So I wrote that down.

And having written it, every single other thing fell into place. It turned out to be what I call a three-biscuit email (it’ll take him those and some tea to work through the things in it) but as a reader today he will fly through the email and know exactly what is going on and exactly what I’m after.

Because I spent so long thinking about the first line, the rest of the email poured out of me in a flash. 

It’s a big deal for me, it’s a complicated subject, but wallop, that email is done and I’m on to the next thing. Specifically I’m on to talking to you. And now I’ll just pop off to get some breakfast. I’m starving and saying all that about biscuits did not improve things.

Advice for the overwhelmed

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Lifehacker has a suggestion for – wait, I’m forever telling you about good-to-great Lifehacker articles, have you bookmarked that site yet? – one way to cope when you’re drowning:

http://lifehacker.com/try-an-s-o-s-stop-organize-secure-when-you-re-over-1477798160

Try it. I have my own systems and they are in my book, The Blank Screen (US link, UK link). Mind you, I think this business of coping on bad days is so important and I believe what I can tell you about it is potentially so useful, I give away that Blank Screen chapter for free. Here it is: Bad Days from The Blank Screen.

I hope it and the Lifehacker article are useful to you.

You’re on your own and it’s necessary

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“It just seems like, you agree to have a certain personality or something. For no reason. Just to make things easier for everyone.”

Angela Chase (Claire Danes) in My So-Called Life

pilot episode by Winnie Holzman

Maybe you were the class clown in school. If you run in to someone from there today, you still are. To them. You’re somewhat older and you’ve been through the wars but that doesn’t matter. You’re the clown, they’re the ones who were your best friends even though you now cannot see what you had in common with them. She’s the one you fancied and, god, if you aren’t still tongue-tied talking to her.

We are slotted into types and categories by everyone and we do it to them too. This is true, this has always been true, and it has always been interesting when you run into more than one set of friends at the same time. And it’s hugely more interesting now that we have Facebook and you can see the strata of your life reflected in those friends who knew you here, who knew you there. 

But there is one result of all this that actually holds you back. That stops you doing things.

It’s this. Call five friends and tell them you’re moving to New York. You haven’t got a job there, it’s just something you’ve got to do and you hope to find somewhere cheap to stay at first. I hope that at least one of your friends will be excited for you but you know that at least four, probably all five, will try to talk you out of it.

They’d be right to. No job? Nowhere to stay? They’re looking out for you, they care for you. This would be why they are your five closest friends that you can call about this stuff.

There’s a part of them, too, that reckons New York is a long away and they’ll never see you again. You can’t object to that, that’s lovely.

Only, there is also this unconscious part of them that says you’re not the one who goes to New York. You’re not the one who starts a new business, you’re not the sort to do anything they haven’t already seen you do.

Consequently, unless they are very unusual people – and you hang on to them if they are – you will forever find them holding you back. Their concerns for your wellbeing coupled to this locked perception of what you are and what you do means your friends will invariably hold you back.

So you can’t take their advice. You just can’t. If you did, you’d never do anything. I sound like I’m criticising your friends but really the only thing I dislike is what they do afterwards. After you’ve moved to New York, after you’ve started your business. Then they tell you they always knew you could do it. Sometimes they take credit. That, I criticise.

But the rest of this is just practical: no advice from friends, just don’t do it.

If you want to do something, if you want to start something new and your friends cannot give you the advice or help that will get it going, then you’d think that you would turn to strangers.

Unfortunately, if you find a stranger who knows all about New York and starting businesses, the odds are that they sell relocations to New York and they sell services to new businesses. They don’t see you the way you were because they’ve never seen you before. But they also cannot be looking out for you as well as your friends are. 

Which means, sorry, you’re on your own. It’s a horrible place to be because you are a composite of your friends and these strangers: it’s easier to stay where you are and it’s easy to find falsely rose answers too.

Look for people who have done or who are doing what you want to do. Work with them. I believe now that this is why writers’ groups can be so useful: writing is an illness and nobody understands that more than other writers. I say I believe it now because I’ve only recently found a kind of group that works for me. Proper, traditional, meet-every-Friday groups have never done it for me: I’ve not fitted in or the group doesn’t want the same things I do. (Example: I’m a professional writer, I write to be read, but two groups I tried were more into the cathartic nature of writing for oneself, writing for pleasure.  Fine, but not for me.)

Earlier this year I earned a place on Room 204, a programme run by Writing West Midlands. It’s a programme without an overt agenda: they even say there are no meetings and sessions, but there end up being meetings and sessions and they are terrific.

I come away from those enthused, fired up, certain that I can do whatever mad idea I currently have – and then I do it.

Thereafter, I’m the guy who does that mad thing. 

I’m being fairly specific about Room 204 here when I wanted to talk in much vaguer generalisations. I’m talking about all of your friends and everything you do.

But hopefully there is one friend who both wants what’s best for you and sees that it is this new mad idea you have to pursue. If you also see both what’s best for her or him and you see that it is their new mad idea that they have to pursue, marry them.

Best word of the day: Schumpeterianism. And how it can help you be productive

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It apparently means “creative destruction”. I’d not heard the word before and I still can’t pronounce it with confidence, I also have a bit of doubt that I can spell it. So think of this paragraph as my making a run up to leaping straight in to it and seeing if I can write the word Schumpeterianism.

I need tea. Don’t ask me to do that again.

I’d like you to nip straight to this Lifehacker article rather than listen to me but so you know what you’re getting, it’s really a piece about how to take criticism and use it. How to take criticism without it hurting. For some reason this week I’ve been in several conversations where something similar has come up: my The Blank Screen book has a whole chapter called How to Get Rejected and it’s helped people. A reader tweeted at me that this specific chapter had ignited him. Oh, that felt good.

But hang on, you can read The Blank Screen any time. (If you’re in the States, it’s waiting for you here instead.) Have you already seen this article about – deep breath and no, I hadn’t thought of copy-and-paste until you just said it – Schumpeterianism?

If I got that word wrong the first time, I’ve now just copied-and-pasted the error. So much for your great idea, thanks a bunch. I blame you.

The you who I hope is now nipping off to read the original piece here on Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/apply-schumpeterianism-to-push-through-criticism-and-1473769363

How to get rejected

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I offer that the best thing any writer can do is get someone else to do the writing. You’re thinking they might do my blogs shorter and let you get a word in. You’re thinking Dan Brown could retain his apparently gripping stories but that you and I might be able to read beyond chapter one. (Didn’t you say you’d managed more than me?)

But I mean it and I wish it were something you could very readily do. Commission other writers and it will change the way you write. It will change how you see the whole process. And it will mean fully half the rejections you get won’t trouble you.

Best of all, you’ll no longer take it personally when an editor phones you up, skips all the polite stuff about how great your typing is and just comes straight in laughing about the very worst bit of your script. It’s happened to me and I admit I wish I hadn’t written that scene, whichever it was, but I laughed along with that editor because he was funny, he was right, it was a dreadful scene – and because I knew we’d fix it. I can’t remember the scene and I’m struggling to remember which script it was but I can tell you the editor: Alan Barnes at Doctor Who.

You want to write the best drama you can and that’s what he and all the Big Finish people want too. It’s not what every editor, producer or director I’ve worked for wants but usually it is. (I once had a director whose chief dramatic aim, I am certain, was to make sure he could catch his last bus home after the play. I never knew a human being could make me as angry but now, when I can instantly recall the bile but cannot draw his name to mind, I’m glad it happened. Because I wonder if I’d appreciate the directors I’ve worked with since. Ken Bentley, Nick Briggs and Barnaby Edwards at Big Finish; Polly Tisdall, Tessa Walker and Tom Saunders at the Birmingham Rep. I imagine I would, I imagine I must, but I really do because of this fella.)

This is going to sound all idealistic and happy-clappy but everyone wants the best show they can make. I found plenty of jaded people in journalism, maybe I’ve just been lucky in drama so far. But if the ideal is that this is what we want, the harsh practicality is that there is never any time to piddle about.

And this is one reason for rejections. Nobody wants to reject anyone, everyone wants the material to be great, everyone needs the material to be great right now or sooner, please. If your piece isn’t what that person or people need at this moment, they’re off looking for the one that is and you’re rejected.

I feel I’m telling you something you think is obvious and yet it keeps coming up. Rejection isn’t personal, it just feels as I it is because we’re writers and we are required to dig very deep and scrape very personally to make drama. Even though you know, intellectually, that it isn’t personal, it feels it. When it’s your innards on the page, it’s hard not to take a rejection as being a rejection of you.

So commission someone else and see what it’s like. I’m not sure how you can do that very easily, I’m afraid. But I’ve done it on magazines and quickly got to the stage where I had no ruth at all. You need this or that piece and you need it by a certain date: you don’t care who writes it, you just have these pages to fill and fill well.

It kills me to say this, as a writer, but we’re not the most reliable people. After my first month on a magazine, every deadline I ever gave anyone was a lie. It had to be. I had to have time for them to be late, I had to have time for me to cope if they failed to deliver at all and I had to have time to handle it if their writing wasn’t good enough.

You can of course argue that it was only my opinion whether their writing was good enough or not, but that was my job. And if I didn’t do it or I wasn’t good enough at it, I’d be rejected and replaced.

I found that there were a few writers who I could really rely on. I’d know they’d write well and I’d know they would deliver on time. I used them over and over again – and so would you. From the outside, it looked like I’d got myself a stable of writers and that it was a pretty closed bunch. On the inside, it was that I was trying to get a stable of writers and unfortunately it was a pretty closed group because I couldn’t find many more to add to it.

Getting into my stable was hard. I don’t say this to make out that anyone would want to, that it was in someway a special set, but genuinely, really, practically: it was hard to get in. I had this many pages to fill with this many articles and I had this long in which to do it. It was easier to hand over a feature to one of these writers I knew would do it. I could hand that off and forget about it for a few weeks. As those weeks ticked by, it became less that it was easy to hand it over to them, more that it was essential.

Taking on someone new is a risk and a risk that takes a lot of time. And this was just on a magazine: drama is so much bigger, so much more complex and so much more pressured. So taking on someone new is so much more of a risk and takes so much more time – that you don’t have.

I’ve never commissioned drama. I’m new to writing it. But because I have commissioned writers, I believe I get it. People can tell you rejection isn’t personal but I think you really only get it when you’ve been even briefly on the other side.

It doesn’t absolve you from trying to write better but it does stop you wanting to give up.

Even when a guy phones you and laughs down the line.